When running data modes such as the very popular FT8, it’s important to keep your computer clock accurate because if it’s more than a couple of seconds out then you won’t be able to decode anyone, they won’t be able to decode you and you won’t make any QSOs. There are a number of utilities […]
Category: Amateur radio
SCC RTTY Championship 2018 – The results
In 2017 I entered and won the 15m section of the SCC RTTY Championship and although I wasn’t available for the full 24 hours of the contest this year, I did make a token entry by operating for around four hours on the Sunday morning. The problem was that on the Sunday, conditions had absolutely […]
Statistics for the third quarter of 2018
A gorgeously lovely summer means I spent less time on the wireless for these three months, making just over 600 QSOs and working only 80 DXCC entities. My data / phone / CW ratio is still about the same as earlier in the year and I’ve picked up three new entities on 160m and two […]
What constitutes “real radio”?
This is a question that’s being asked a lot these days. For me, the answer is fairly simple. If it involves RF leaving my station on a frequency which requires me to have an amateur radio licence to transmit on, then it’s “real radio”. That is, it’s “Amateur radio”. That includes, HF, VHF, UHF, etc […]
Visiting GB6NT at Walton-on-the-Naze
A few days ago was the International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend and a group of locals under the umbrella of Colchester Radio Amateurs operated a special event station using the callsign GB6NT from the Naze Tower at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex. This location is very close to me and I visited on both Saturday and Sunday. On […]
Running my own DX Cluster again
A few years ago I set up a DXCluster using AR-Cluster on my old Mac Mini with Windows XP installed. It ran for a long time, I had good connections into the network and although it was listed on the DX Cluster info page, nobody ever connected to me. This was fine, the cluster was […]
An unexpected QRP entry into the DMC RTTY 2018 contest
I keep a regular eye on the contest calendars as although I don’t have a lot of time for serious entries, it’s nice to be able to give away a few points. For example – I worked around one hundred stations in the IARU HF World Championship last weekend without too much effort. This weekend […]
Statistics for the second quarter of 2018
Although this blog hasn’t been very active over the last few months, I’m still operating the radio regularly. The warmer weather has appeared in the UK and I’m spending a lot of time outside walking, riding my bike, eating ice-cream and topping up my sun tan. During the second quarter of 2018, I’ve made just […]
The return of GR6NHU
Last weekend saw the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle which wasn’t an event I was particularly interested in but all UK radio amateurs were given the opportunity to use a special prefix to celebrate. The last time we were allowed to use a GR prefix was back in 2011. I applied for […]
Updated guide to setting up an APRS RX only iGate using a Raspberry Pi, RTL-SDR dongle and a pre-built image
** image has been updated as of 21/04/2018 to resolve the problems some people had booting their Pi ** Note: 27/02/2022 The compressed version is available via SourceForge, is not corrupted and will still work if you can decompress it. I am still seeding the two torrent files, the compressed one is here and the […]
